Day two of New York Comic Con was exhausting and brilliant, brimming over with insightful panels (which we’ll discuss in detail later) and hordes of costumed attendees. Artists sketched, dealers shuffled their products, and fans milled around. It may have…
The first day of New York Comic Con was a relatively laid-back affair, a few panels in the morning for industry professionals, and a dry run for exhibitors on the main floor before the craziness of the weekend. It was an…
With a career spanning thirty-odd years, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark are a difficult band to categorize; they’re really a band with two distinct styles, dabbling equally in experimentalism and carefully crafted pop singalongs, mixing the two in varying degrees at…
CSC Funk Band- Things Are Getting Too Casual (Fat Beats records, released 8/23/11) CSC Funk Band’s debut album is a thing of mysterious wonder, a heady, sweaty brew of extended improvisations and afro-beat inflected grooves. The group pull a variety…
Kid Savant are a band from NYC who are beginning to garner acclaim for their high-tension brand of synthpop. Their live show is sparse and direct: four guys onstage, lit only with projections, building anthems from tones and beats…
At the beginnimg of 2010, a music teacher from England made available for download an album he’d created that mixed vocal tracks by the Wu-Tang Clan with beats made from Beatles songs. That collection, Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers, created…
There’s a category of pop comic that I haven’t really discussed yet: the anthology devoted to a specific band/musician. Starting in the mid 90s with Kitchen Sink’s Grateful Dead Comix and continuing through the musician-themed volumes from Image Comics in…
In 1977, Marvel Comics launched a new publication: a full-color magazine-format title entitled Marvel Super Special. This title was intended to showcase stand-alone stories that were too long to fit in a normal 32 page comic, and to provide Marvel…
I’ve been waiting to write about Phonogram. There are so many rock and roll comics to cover, so many different books with different approaches, and this one looms large. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s series is, in my mind, the…
Growing up in a dead-end town, practicing guitar in the basement. Hoping music could be the ticket to something better. Ambitions of stardom, rehearsing the songs, taking any gig that comes along, imagining away the harsh realities of everyday life.…